Sounds of gunfire and battle surrounded him distantly, but it'd been Steve's lullaby for years. He was used to it. The occasional pachow pachow along with the ever-constant pops of machine gun exchange had let him know that he was home ever since he'd become Captain America.

In his sleep, something brushed over his nose, light like a feather. Steve would try to swipe it away but for some reason his arms were too heavy and he was so damn tired. He hated it when the Commandos played their pranks on him while he was asleep. It was almost always Bucky or Dum Dum, but Bucky always put more thought into his jokes and Dugan had played this one once or twice before.

"Dugan." Steve groaned. "Cut it out, I'm too tired. Jus' lemme sleep, would ya?" His Brooklyn accent always got thicker in his drowsiness .

Obviously his complaints had done nothing to persuade him, but Steve continued anyway. He needed sleep. "You've pulled this prank before and it ain't that funny, Dum Dum." But when he cracked open his eyes he was not face to face with a burly man with a bristled mustache poking a feather in his face. The red hair was still there, brushing across his nose, in fact, but instead it framed womanly features and tearful eyes. So it wasn't his comrade messing with him after all.

It was Natasha leaning over him. Her mouth was forming disparate words, but he couldn't hear them over the roar of guerrilla warfare. He blankly stared at her lips, trying to understand.

Suddenly her voice rushed back into his ears. "—eve!" She said. Scratch that, screamed. She was so loud he couldn't possibly think of not hearing her before. "Look at me, Steve, you have to stay awake. You're injured, but help is on the way. Stay with me." There was a tell-tale whistle as a far-away bomb fell and the building they were in shook expectedly at its impact. "Stay with me."

Fear. In her voice, her face. Natasha was afraid.

Steve blearily looked around him in a desperate attempt to comprehend all that was happening. Natasha was sobbing, but for what, he had no clue. A battle was taking place outside. He could hear as much, and it was painfully clear in his ears. They were in a tall building, a burning one, he realized with a sloppy glance. He didn't know why they were still in the weakening structure, why his teammate was crying or why she said he was injured. He didn't feel injured.

One look down answered all that he needed to know.

A heavy metal beam was laid across his entire front and blood seeped through his navy uniform nearest to the rusted steel. He didn't know how the beam got on him, even while he ransacked his brain for a memory, but there was a laceration beneath it, a seemingly deep wound, going by the amount of crimson pouring from it.

No, Steve amended in his head a second later when pain spiked through his abdomen and chest as abruptly and unexpectedly as Natasha's voice had rushed back to his hearing, it was definitely a far-reaching wound.

For a long second, he stared at that beam. It was about eight feet long, four inches thick and a foot and a half wide. It had to weigh a ton, he calculated in his head. Steve had no chance of lifting the beam in his state. He had suffered through the Great Depression, had his life tossed in the air in sickness, fought in the worst war the world had seen and an industrial beam would kill him.

Life was like that, he supposed.

All his senses seemed to be coming back. He could smell the dense smoke when he dared to breathe and he tasted the gunpowder and sand on his tongue. But he couldn't focus on anything long before the pain on his chest and just below his ribs slammed him with new waves of suffering. Every breath ached in his lungs and even while he laid as still as he could, agony rammed him with every heartbeat.

Natasha. He thought beyond the haze of struggling to breathe through the pain and smoke. Coughing stung his throat and kicked ruthlessly at his lungs, but he managed to speak. "Natasha," a weak coughing fit, leaving him with burning eyes. "Get out of here. Find me once you get help."

Another tear falls from her cheek. "Rogers I won't—" she floundered with her breathing as well. A sharp inhale of smoke. "I won't leave you here. We go together. As a team." Tear tracks paved through the layer of soot lining her cheeks. She was either coughing or sobbing, he couldn't tell. "Isn't that what you said, Steve? Together?"

He remembered where he was now. In the Middle East, at some border of Sudan, where terrorists had formed their Head Quarters. His recollection was indistinct, but he could recall that there were hostages—dozens of hostages—and the whole team had come to neutralize the place and save the people. He had a vague notion that he'd told the team before the battle that they would take them down and that they would take them down together.

Regret for that rose in his heart. He'd been wrong. They wouldn't be together because Steve wouldn't be okay after this. He wouldn't make it for much longer, with his shallow breaths and slowing pulse.

"Natasha," he begged, "Please. I'll be alright." It was meant to sound stronger but came out as more of a wheeze.

He watched as she transformed into another person. She rose with a swift motion and a shuddering breath and wiped the tears from her eyes. "Okay." She said. "Okay."

Her stance was utterly business-like as she stalked to an exit. But when she cast one last glance back at him, there was a gaping crack in her veneer of composure, revealing her horror.

Steve released a sigh of relief when she was finally out, a small one, given, with a beam lying across his right shoulder to his left leg, and closed his eyes.

If he blocked his pain and the sound of crackling fire and the collapsing building and concentrated on the gunfire, he could pretend he was home. That he was looking at Bucky's smile, and Dugan and Gabe were making jokes, and he could hear Mortia and Dernier laughing while Falsworth looked on in amused exasperation.

He could imagine that he wasn't so cold all the time and that his heart was light and his friends were alive, not buried beside each other in the Arlington National Cemetery.

He would be happy and carefree in his death, with the sinking knowledge that his last words would be a lie.

To be continued . . .